Late Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson kept fighting for gun control till the very end

By KENNETH THOMPSON

|Special to the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Oct 15, 2016 | 6:53 PM

The late Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson never stopped fighting for gun control. (Seth Wenig/AP)

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson penned a column for the Daily News on gun trafficking months before his death. The column on one of his signature issues is published here for the first time.

Ronald Wallace Jr. was about to start high school in 2012 when he was tragically shot and killed on a Brownsville street. He was an innocent teenager, just 13 years old, when his life was taken by a young man armed with a .38-caliber revolver. That gun made its way to Brooklyn from Oxford, N.C., where it was purchased three years earlier. The shooter was convicted of murder and is serving up to life in prison.

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Unfortunately, that case is not unique as 90% of guns used in New York City crimes were bought in other states, mostly in the South. New York has strong gun laws, but clearly more needs to be done on the federal level to stop the flow of guns into our city.

Gun traffickers make a lot of money buying guns outside of New York and selling them for double and triple the price in our neighborhoods. These merchants of death know that federal gun trafficking laws do not stop them from buying guns legally in one state and sending them to New York. I've heard them brazenly discussing this on wiretaps as they've hauled their deadly merchandise into our city.

It's easy to buy a gun in many states. That reality sabotages our efforts to keep these weapons off of our streets. Similarly, California is inundated with guns from Arizona and Nevada, and the strict-gun-law state of Illinois is flooded with guns from lax-law Indiana.

Local police and prosecutors work hard to address this lucrative multi-state crime. In Brooklyn, we've dismantled three major gun-trafficking rings since 2014, preventing more than 400 guns — including AR-15s, AK-47s and other assault rifles — from reaching the hands of criminals. To do so, we worked closely with our law enforcement partners in other jurisdictions.

We didn't just charge the sellers we arrested here. We went to Georgia and elsewhere and arrested residents of those states who bought the guns, knowing those weapons were headed north to be sold illegally. We charged them as co-conspirators, put them on Rikers Island and brought them to face justice in Brooklyn.

My office is doing everything it can, but this gun-running scourge knows no state boundaries. It demands a strong federal response.

Bipartisan bills have been introduced in Congress that would prohibit firearms trafficking, specifically targeting traffickers who make multiple sales. Those bills have all stalled and the public should demand to know why. This is a national crisis that demands a national response.